Tag Archives: New Delhi

Feb201312

How to curate and present big data sets in India? A group of about 70 coders and journalists met for the first Hacks/Hackers New Delhi hackathon in order to answer that question.

Attendees introduced themselves to the group and then pitched an idea for a data-driven story. Initial ideas included stories in environment, sports, health and crime. The group then broke into smaller groups of six to eight people, working to scrape and parse their data before coding their interactive data visualizations.

After four hours, the groups met again to present their demos. The ideas presented included:

Mapping the Maha Kumbh Mela which mapped information about the location of public services at the Maha Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious festivals in the world, currently happening in Allahabad, India.

Crimes against women, an interactive map of rape charges by state. The team added additional layers to show how often rape resulted in a police complaint, and how many of these complaints actually led to convictions.

Health investment and doctor availability, which graphed the availability of doctors by state, as well as investment made in each state by international health funding agencies.

Literacy and social ills, which graphed literacy rates per states against the occurrence of other social ills like crime and infant mortality, to see if literacy correlated with lower incidences of social problems.

Infant mortality, a heat map of infant mortality across states that attempts to visualize where the problem was most concentrated across India.

Many groups faced challenges gathering the data they needed, either because such granular data do not exist for India or because the information isn’t in the public domain. To read more about one group’s experience and see clips from their visualization, read journalist Pierre Fitter’s blog post.

Jan201302

Hacks/Hackers New Delhi, the first Hacks/Hackers chapter in India, launched Dec. 5. About 50 journalists, techies and supporters came by What’s Up Bharat, in Hauz Khas Village to talk about the challenges of combining media and technology in India.

Nikhil Pahwa (@nixxin), founder and publisher of digital analysis site MediaNama, said he’s looking for people to take a closer look at ways to organize big data. He also suggested creating tools that can track the evolution of stories and ideas in real-time.

Kushan Mitra (@kushanmitra), managing editor of digital coordination and new projects at the Pioneer, led a conversation about the need for new revenue models in the digital media space, particularly in the Indian context.

And Narendra Nag (@narendranag), general manager of 2020Social, talked about his experiences as a hack/hacker for the past 10 years, and the fact that both journos and techies have a lot of learn from each other’s different viewpoints.

The crowd asked questions, enjoyed free pizza and cheap beer, and decided to throw a hackathon sometime in January. A few journalists asked for more workshops in coding and tech skills, and a lot of attendees were interested in a session on how to better understand Indian consumers’ digital behavior.

A good conversation and a great launch event that was also covered in The Sunday Guardian (New Delhi). For more info, check out this article.

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